Assessing The Impact Of Green Transfor-mation On Ecological Well-being Perfor-mance In Western China

Natural resources are becoming more and more scarce,which is a major barrier to sustainable development.At the moment,a crucial problem for sustainable development is how to resolve the conflict between finite resources and limitless material pursuits.Urban development is progressively moving away from rapid growth and toward sustainable growth.Ecological welfare performance is a key tool for achieving concurrent economic and social growth and raising people’s welfare because it is used to assess how effectively natural resources contribute to human welfare.By altering production and lifestyles to better utilize resources and achieve coordinated ecological,social,and economic development,green transformation,an emerging strategy for sustainability,has a significant effect on ecological welfare performance.In order to improve ecological welfare performance and advance urban green transformation in the western region,the goal of this paper is to objectively evaluate the effect of green transformation on ecological welfare performance.The impact mechanism of green transformation on ecological welfare performance is theoretically analyzed in this thesis based on sustainable development theory,green economy theory,and welfare economy theory.Western regions are then selected for empirical analysis to quantitatively assess the impact factors and spillover effects of urban green transformation on ecological welfare performance.Based on the panel data of 78 prefecture-level cities in the western region from 2012 to 2019,we first assessed the ecological welfare performance(EWP)and green transformation index(GTI)in the western region using the Super-SBM model and entropy weighting method,examined their spatial and temporal evolution patterns in terms of overall and spatial characteristics,and analyzed the spatial distribution patterns of EWP and GTI using the interrupted point classification and the Thiel index The spatial distribution pattern and spatial variation characteristics of EWP and GTI were analyzed by interrupted point classification and Thiel index,and then the spatial exploratory analysis was used to reveal the spatial correlation characteristics of ecological welfare performance,and the spatial econometric model was used to reveal how the green transformation index affects the improvement of ecological welfare performance.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The ecological welfare performance of the western region is moderate and fluctuates upward during the study period,and the lower the EWP the greater the improvement potential.The spatial pattern of contiguous development is stable and there is a certain aggregation effect,regional differences are gradually alleviated,and intraprovincial differences are the main source of regional differences.(2)The green transformation index in the western region is at a middle to lower level,with a smaller rise,and the trend of environmental friendliness is significantly faster than the trend of livelihood improvement and economic transformation.The high-level cities are mainly the more economically developed regions,with the provincial capital cities or municipalities directly under the central government as the center of the hierarchical diffusion trend,and the intra-provincial differences are alleviated.(3)Ecological welfare performance in western region has significant spatial correlation and spatial aggregation characteristics,which are divided into four types: H-H aggregation,H-L aggregation,L-L aggregation and L-H aggregation.(4)The green transformation index can positively promote the ecological welfare performance of western cities as well as neighboring cities,but the internal indicators have different effects on EWP.The comprehensive utilization rate of industrial solid waste,the harmless treatment rate of domestic waste,household savings level,employee wages and R&D expenditure have significant contributing effects on ecological welfare performance,while industrial smoke emission and per capita consumption of social retail goods have significant inhibiting effects on the improvement of ecological welfare performance.In addition,sewage treatment rate,R&D expenditure and the number of green patent applications have significant spatial spillover effects on the improvement of EWP in western cities.